


Homecoming

by josephina_x



Series: Dimension 46'\-D [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Gen, One Year Later, Post-Series, Post-Weirdmageddon, See You Next Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 10:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13074705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: Bill is baaaaaack!





	Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> Fic: Homecoming  
> Fandom: Gravity Falls  
> Pairing: n/a  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Spoilers: through the end of the series, and some of the books (Journal #3)  
> Summary: Bill is baaaaaack!  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.  
> AN: My try at a very different sort of thing. ...Yeah, I know. Not-really-very. *sighs sadly*

\---

Bill slowly blinked his eyes open.

...Wow, two eyes. Huh.

Couldn’t seem to see out of one of them, but hey, he’d take one out of two any century of the millenia.

\--Woah! Head hurt something fierce letting the light in that fast, but he fixed that real quick by closing his eyes again.

Hmmmm. Maybe…

Bill slowly stretched in place, like a cat, almost. Except more leisurely.

Ah, there. That was better. Gotta lot of aches in his body to sort out, but...

He slitted open his eyes again, grinning in pure pleasure. He felt _warm_. He hadn’t felt _warm_ in one trillion years!

He wasn’t just possessing somebody’s body -- he had his own, and it was three-dimensional with five senses and a little bit achy, but it was _warm_ and functional and it was _glorious!_

Bill closed his eyes and stretched again, but _this_ time he didn’t limit his motion, slowly cataloguing each and every odd little ache and pain as he went.

Bill started laughing, ecstatic.

He let his arms and legs dangle out at full extension when he was done, absently mapping out the shape and texture of what his body was telling him was underneath him. (...He was lying on a couch?)

He hummed out a breath through his lips, happily, as he fully relaxed his muscles and limbs, and blinked open his eyes again fully.

A colorful vista of dark-stained wood ceiling greeted him, lit up with white-yellow sunlight.

Ha! Well, that confirmed it -- he definitely wasn’t in the mindscape anymore, or on the wrong side of the rift! Success!

He turned his head slightly to the side to see blue skies and a few puffy white clouds.

Whoops. Guess his backup plan to use his timestop as a save point, in case he ever needed to roll back anything and pull a ‘take two’ with Weirdmageddon, had backfired just a bit. He hadn’t really set up the spell to be able to operate without his direct input, and he’d had to pin down each fixed point of time he’d wanted to hold onto in the back of his mind, to keep things potentially non-permanent. Dying must’ve screwed something up and unraveled nearly everything physical he’d done in the meantime, all the way back to the rift first opening. And if that had happened, pretty much all the weirdness he’d let through into it, including the Henchmaniacs, would’ve probably been sucked right back in as everything rewound, other than himself.

\--Oh, well! Live and learn! He supposed he could punch a hole through the weakened part of this dimension himself, to reopen the rift again if need be, now that he was on the other side of it.

The gang probably wasn’t still in his old decaying dimension, though. While he’d been stuck there, he’d had to use his own mindscape to hold everything together, expanding it out to the edges of the dimension to give him full control of the space and time within it, and halt the collapse. With the rift closed, and Bill not conscious -- therefore not active and able to keep doing that -- the Nightmare Realm would finish collapsing soon if it hadn’t already.

Not a problem, though -- with the way Bill had set things up in the place, transient portals opened there randomly but frequently, and with the way things should have cascaded, even more portals should have opened and closed periodically as it collapsed, before everything completely destabilized. His friends weren’t stupid; they would’ve bailed through the nearest portals as soon as they saw the rift close and that Bill wasn’t back there with them. Interdimensional hopping and global domination were old hat to all of them; they’d be fine without him.

He’d have to figure out the timing, and see if it was possible for him to reopen the rift without too much of a risk of destabilizing everything entirely. If it was, well, he could use the pressure differential between this dimension and the decaying one to power a _lot_ of what he wanted to do, effortlessly. But if the space between dimensions had already collapsed… well, he’d just gotten done with getting out of an unstable dimension that had been collapsing in on itself. He might be insane, but even he didn’t want to completely destabilize this new dimension he’d just laid claim to if he could help it. He’d spent a trillion years looking forward to being able to get out there and go dimension-hopping himself!

If there was one thing Bill had learned over the millions upon millions of years, it was that he could only go through a portal between stable dimensions. Trying to hold an unstable dimension stable _and_ open a portal _and_ then try and go through that portal, all at the same time, and make it out the other side intact without the portal coming apart at the seams in the middle of the process, just wasn’t something he could do. It was the equivalent of a human trying to crawl backwards out of their own mouth, while leaving their skin behind: it just wasn’t happening.

This dimension was his home, now -- he’d laid claim to it a loooong time ago, and he wanted a base of operations. Also, all his Zodiac members were here. It was just downright _convenient_. He didn’t want to crash it unnecessarily, let alone _accidentally_ like last time.

Bill thought through all this in mere moments, as he crossed his arms behind his head and slid down to lie flat on the couch.

Once settled, he shifted, stretching a bit in place again. He pulled his knees up to cross one over the other, casually kicking a foot back and forth, as he raised his head up a tad.

He saw Sixer and Stanley at the opposite end of the couch. They were standing next to each other and looking down at him with almost-identical stunned expressions on their faces.

Bill laughed and gave them a grin, letting his head fall back and pulling his arms together to cushion it in a higher, more comfortable position. “Well, well, well! Sixer and Stanley Pines! Did you miss me?” His grin widened and he kicked his foot back and forth a bit again. “Admit it, you missed me!”

He watched Stanley tense and clench his fists, while Stanford visibly flinched away from him. Huh.

He tilted his head to look at them both a little more carefully.

“...Where’s your gun, IQ?” he asked, curious. “Would’ve thought you’d have it out by now. Real warm welcome, this is!” he laughed.

He saw Sixer lose the fear to look at him angrily and tense -- that was _much_ better! -- but before he responded, there was a clamor and both Shooting Star and Pine Tree were up on the porch, looking determined and angry.

Bill casually sat up and uncrossed his knees as he watched Shooting Star snatch up her grappling hook gun from the floor of the porch and point it at him, only to have Stanley put his arm down to grab the front of the hook with his hand and shove both it and her behind him protectively. Bill frowned slightly and wondered what it had been doing on the porch, instead of with the kid.

He glanced over at Pine Tree, who was standing there clutching to his chest… a journal with a pine tree silhouette on it? --Wow, how long had he been out of the loop?

Bill slung his left arm over his bent knee and propped his chin up in his palm.

“H-how are you inside the barrier, Bill?!” Pine Tree stammered out, and Bill blinked at him.

“Barrier?” Bill repeated. He looked to his left, then realized that he was on the back porch of the Shack. He frowned slightly, then looked down at his right hand and snapped his fingers once, twice. Nothing. Hmm.

He reached for his all-seeing eye inside his mind and… felt something of a muted near-blankness in the immediate area. Well, that wasn’t right. Sixer had had triangles all over the Shack before, and tree knots all around the woods; he should’ve gotten a lot more than that through any interference. Bill pulled a face. All he was getting was stuff built into the architecture of the place, though _that_ was coming through crystal-clear…

Huh. Then that probably meant...

Bill frowned in concentration. He narrowed his physical eyes and glanced left, then right, using the motion to help focus his magical senses, rusty from disuse -- he hadn’t had to rely on magic rather than his own power in a long, long time. He felt his expression go a little blank from surprise at what he sensed. Just to confirm, he tried to flex his own personal energy internally, just a bit, and then ‘breathe in’ metaphysically.

Aha. “Fordsy~~,” Bill said almost teasingly, straightening in place, as he felt a smile begin to grace his face again, “Did you use _moonstones_ to anchor down that mystical barrier of yours?”

“Well, yes, I did,” Sixer said, sounding a tad nonplussed -- and completely failing to notice the ‘you idiot!’ look Stanley shot him for talking, ha! “Why?”

Bill was already taking in a breath as Sixer responded, though; it had been more of a rhetorical question.

He tilted his head back slightly and sang out an overtone at exactly the right ‘wrong’ frequency, _loudly_ , at the top of his lungs. And while the sound he was producing had all four Pines yelping and covering their ears, the two-tone resonance he was belting out also had the weakest of the crystalline moonstones _shattering_ with a rather loud **‘crack!”** within seconds.

Bill stopped singing.

He grinned and held up his right thumb and middle finger, snapped once.

Blue flames sprang into being around his hand.

Bill laughed.

It was cute to watch all the Pines begin to slowly back away from him -- like they thought they might actually be able to get away, ha! -- as he put the fire out, lit it again, and then started to play with the flames across his fingers, just for fun.

“Oh, hey, so triangle-dude’s awake?” Bill heard, and he looked over to see Question Mark standing in the grass at the side of the porch, looking over the railing at him. “Huh. Did you know that your hand is on fire?”

Bill raised an eyebrow at him. “Yes.”

“Oh,” said Question Mark. “Uh, it doesn’t hurt, does it?”

Bill eyed him. “No.”

“Ha ha, okay triangle-dude. You do you,” Question Mark said good-naturedly, and Bill couldn’t help but tilt his head and look at him funny.

“Soos! Save yourself!” he heard Stanley call out from… a lot farther away than expected.

“Huh?” Bill said, looking up and over. “--HEY!!” he yelled, jumping into the air and hovering to the edge of the porch as he watched three different vehicles take off at racing speeds down the driveway.

Bill let his shoulders slump and felt his eye twitch. “ _Really._ REALLY.” he said flatly, watching the truck, Stanmobile, and odd tricked-out car each jockey for position to get out onto the road, and away from him.

He narrowed his eye and switched to his all-seeing one, then felt his expression go a little blank as he caught glimpses of every member of the Zodiac -- sans one -- in those vehicles, when he looked out at them from the knots in the trees along the side of the roadway. Stanley was driving the Stanmobile, Red was handling the truck, and Glasses was pressing buttons and spinning the wheel in the third vehicle, with Ford in the shotgun position hanging on for dear life. The kids were interspersed between them, not really of primary concern to Bill just then.

Bill raised a hand, outstretched, to infuse several of the trees down the road with enough weirdness to uproot themselves and get in their way--

“--Uh, triangle-dude?”

Bill’s head snapped upright, not meaning to react to the interruption but unable to ignore it so close by him, and his vision wavered--

“Something wrong?”

\--and his concentration broken broke entirely. And, in so doing, he lost hold of the view from his other eyes. “Agh! You-- You--” Anger rising, he swiveled in place and yelled at the zodiac member, glaring, “WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?!?!!”

“Uh, oops. Sorry dude, didn’t mean to make you mad,” Question Mark told him, actually looking truly sorry about it.

“I was _right_ in the middle of something!” Bill yelled at him.

“Uh… staring out into the middle of the woods?” Question Mark said. He turned to look himself, putting a hand to his brow and peering in the same direction Bill had been facing. “I don’t see anything dude. Should I be worried about something?”

Bill floated there, staring at him.

“Is it the gnomes again?” he was asked. “Those little guys are rough.”

Bill stared.

He took a moment to close his eye and rub at the bridge of his nose. ...Well, at least Sixer couldn’t complete the Zodiac with Question Mark left _here_ instead of with _them_ , right?

He looked back up at Question Mark and saw he was still staring out at the woods.

Bill decided that he was done with this. He just didn’t want to deal with this right now.

He snapped his fingers, shackling a metaphysical blue chain to Question Mark’s leg, and then gestured to attach the other end of it to the base of the Shack.

He stared a bit as Question Mark didn’t even seem to notice, still peering out into the trees, looking for something he couldn’t see.

Bill let out a frustrated sort of sigh at the lack of reaction and waved the visible tangible part of the chain away. It’d grow long enough to give him the run of the Shack and a little bit of the yard, but not long enough to let him get far enough away to do anything that Bill couldn’t see without snapping back into physical existence.

He wondered, briefly, if it was worth it to electrocute Question Mark with the chain, just to see what sort of rise he could get out of him.

“Wait, is it those pinecones over there? ...No wait, those are just shadows, heh.”

...Never mind. At the rate he was going, Bill had a feeling that he’d end up even more underwhelmed with the human then he was already. As far as he was concerned, he was done here. He floated out off the porch, then upwards, followed the roof line above.

“Sure hope it’s not that Chupacabra again, dude needs his hibernation time,” he faintly heard Question Mark say as he glided over the peak of the roof and down to the Shack’s ‘secret roof time’ platform.

He lowered himself down to hovering above the lawn chair, then reclined back to lay down on it entirely and let gravity reassert itself. He slipped his arms behind his head to pillow it again.

He stared up at the sky and closed his eyes.

He heard the wind whisper through the trees, rustling the leaves and branches, felt the sun warming the skin of his face and seep in further.

He felt the sun-warmed air play through his hair in the next light gust of breeze. He relaxed a little.

A bird chirped in the distance. The Shack creaked softly beneath him.

He smiled. He could get used to this.

Then he heard the squeak of brakes and the crunch of gravel a large vehicle makes when pulling into an unpaved lot.

He frowned slightly and opened his eyes.

In his mind’s eye, an image from one of the trees in the front yard popped up in front of him to view.

It was a tour bus.

“Oh, man, the next tour is here,” he ‘heard’ Question Mark say, from the tree’s vantage. “I am so glad that we finished that whole circle thing with everyone before they arrived. That would have been so awkward.”

“Uh, haha, what?” Bill said to himself, confused. The Zodiac hadn’t actually… _summoned_ him, had they?

His gaze swapped from tree knot to tree knot to get a better look at the yard... and the Zodiac circle drawn in chalk in the middle of it.

"Guess I’d better go get ready,” he ‘heard’. He shifted his focus back to peering out the Shack windows in time to watch the remaining Zodiac member turn around and march himself back into the Shack. “You can do this, Mr. Mystery. Yes.”

Welp, now he was confused. ...Hmmmm, maybe they’d wanted to give him the Shack and the easygoing minion as a ‘welcome back, please-don’t-kill-us-we’re-sorry’ gift?

Eh, he’d take it!

Bill kicked back and his smile got a little wider as the sounds of the people getting off the bus and the simple chatter echoed up to him at his vantage point.

He closed all his eyes and just let the sounds flow over him. The Nightmare Realm had been near-silent, except for the undercurrent of mad whispers and the occasional never-ending scream going on. There hadn’t exactly been a whole lot of random living stuff around, or greenery. Exactly zero, in fact. It had been Bill, and his denizens, and the occasional Henchmaniac when they came visiting with something for him to feed on.

Even with his eyes closed, Bill could tell exactly where he was and wasn’t.

It was… nice. And kind of weird, which made it that much better and less of an itch under his not-so-much-an-exoskeleton skin.

He heard the odd cadence of Question Mark’s voice float up from the side of the house as he started the tour, and Bill grinned. He could _definitely_ get used to this.

\---


End file.
